“Late to be paying a visit, even to family,” observed the deputy.
“I have no idea why she was going to see him at that hour. I’m not even sure that’s where she was driving. Besides him, she didn’t have anyone else in the state.” She sighed. “He will have to be told.”
“He’s being brought in to identify the body.”
“Poor man.” She sighed again. “We need to make arrangements.”
“As soon as the coroner finishes the autopsy, the remains can be released to a funeral home.”
“Autopsy? Is that really necessary? If you know she died because of a crash, why do you have to...”
“What was that station wagon used for?” asked the deputy. “Was it used for hauling or any sort of deliveries?”
Mother Magdalen’s brows wrinkled. “Deliveries? No. The bakery comes and gets the bread. Why?”
“The car was loaded with flowers.”
“Just the petals,” added the younger deputy, speaking for the first time since the questioning began. “Pink.”
Khoury saw the flat lips quiver. A hint of emotion, and over flower petals. Why?
“Sometimes we go to town to buy flowers for the chapel,” said the abbess. “They could be from those. From transporting those to the house.”
A lie, thought Khoury.
“But there was a ton of the stuff,” blurted the younger deputy.
“Ma’am,” said the older deputy. “What happened today with the crowd, I’m trying to see what the connection could be. I mean, you lose a sister in a car accident and then this riot...”
“You’re wondering if we have any enemies, if someone is targeting us.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
Khoury could see her eyes shifting a bit as she worked her response out in her mind.
“The miracle rumor was started by people who hate us. They want to make trouble for us because they see us as...different. A bunch of women living together in the country, we’re...curiosities.”
He nodded.
“Whether one of them despised us enough to do harm to Sister Rose...”
“Yeah?”
“Sister was old and shouldn’t have been driving alone, especially at night. Her night vision was terrible.” She sighed heavily. “The timing...two incidents spaced so closely together...well...God is simply testing us.”
The deputy taking notes flipped the page. “So you don’t see a connection?”
The abbess covered her mouth with her hand. “I can’t believe she’s gone,” she croaked through her fingers. “Sister Rose was our rock.”
Though he didn’t believe her grief, Khoury put a hand on her shoulder. “She’s with God now, Mother.”
“We’ll contact you later if we need anything else,” said the older deputy. “Again, we’re very sorry for your loss.”
The note-taker clicked his pen and closed his book. Tried to come up with something pleasant to say. “Uh...sure smells good in here.”
“I’ll have one of the sisters pack you a fresh loaf.”
After the deputies were gone, the mother superior turned to the priest. “I’ll be fine, Father. You don’t need to stay.”
“I’m the one who discovered the station wagon this morning, and went to get help. Sadly, it was too...”
“I thought you worked for the sheriff’s department, as a chaplain.” Her eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”
“Father Ryan Khoury.” He extended his hand.
She stayed seated with her hands atop the desk. “What are you doing here?”
“Visiting the states.”
“What are you doing here, in my convent?”
“I thought you might need assistance after hearing the bad news.”
She stood up and hurried to the office door. Pulled it open and held it. “Thank you for your time, Father. My sisters are my comfort.”
He stayed where he stood. “You don’t have any questions about Sister Rose? How I found her or what I saw when I found her?”
She put her hand to her forehead. “I don’t want to hear the details. It’s all too...”
“Your explanation for the flowers doesn’t make sense.” He came up to her and stood nose to nose. “Sister Rose was...drowning in rose petals.”
Her faced hardened. “Are you calling me a liar?”
“That mob didn’t hate you.”
“You didn’t see.”
“I saw enough. Those people wanted something; they were desperate for it. What’s going on inside this house?”
“I know your type; I fought your type my entire career.” A tight smile stretched her thin lips until they nearly disappeared against her face. “You’re a paternalistic, theocratic bully. You think your collar gives you license to drop in out of nowhere and start pushing me around on my own turf.”
“That’s not...”
“Collar or not, you can’t pull rank on me. I’m in charge here. You’re...I don’t even know who you are. I don’t even know if you’re really a priest.” She stepped into the hallway. “Go before I call the sheriff.”
“Mother Magdalen, if you’re in trouble, I can...”
From upstairs, a high-pitched alarm.
The nun spun around and started running, taking the steps two at a time. “The girls!”
Khoury jogged up after her.
The abbess stopped at a bedroom door at the end of the hallway. Tried the knob. Locked. She jiggled the doorknob and banged her fist against the wood. “Girls! Open!”
From the other side of the door, they heard singing and laughing rising above the screech of the smoke alarm.
The nun pummeled the door with both fists. “Girls! Unlock it!”
Khoury shoved the nun aside. He lifted his foot and brought it down in the middle of the door. Suddenly another man was standing next to him.
“Help him, Trey!” the abbess yelled.
The men kicked in unison and the door slammed open.
In the middle of the room, three girls held hands while skipping around a metal trashcan in the center of their circle. “Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies! Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down!”
They released hands and dropped to the floor, giggling hysterically.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Rossi stood along one side of the autopsy table while the pathologist was stationed along the other, a scalpel in his gloved fist. Also in the room was an investigator, a gray-haired veteran from the sheriff’s department. He and the doctor had given Rossi permission to observe, but only after checking her out with the bureau. Camp had supported her story that she was an FBI agent who’d happened upon the body while driving in the countryside with a couple of friends, and that she wanted to watch the autopsy out of professional curiosity.
The doctor had already weighed and measured the corpse and conducted an exam of the exterior, recording all findings via a microphone dangling over the table. Now it was time to open the body.
When the pathologist reached to pull the sheet down, the corpse burst into flames.
“Christ!” he yelled, and dropped the scalpel.
“Shit!” hollered the investigator.
Rossi gasped and threw up her arm.
As the trio fell away from the table in horror and amazement, an alarm blasted and sprinklers went off, raining water down on the room. On the body.
The pathologist – an older guy – backed up until he was pressed against the wall. He ripped off his face shield and threw it on the floor. Stared at the spectacle with unblinking eyes.
“Out!” ordered the investigator, throwing open the door.
“Come on!” yelled Rossi, tugging on the stunned doctor’s lab coat.
The three fled from the room, closing the door after them to contain the blaze. Rossi and the investigator pulled off their face shields and peered through the door’s glass window. Even under the steady gray drizzle, the body of Sister Rose Estelle continued to burn.
“Good God!” the investigat
or yelled over the din of the alarm. “What the hell happened?”
“Chemicals in her body?” Rossi offered.
The doctor didn’t buy it. “Bullshit! I’ve seen everything and I’ve never seen this!”
Putting her palm over the glass, she could feel the heat from the funeral pyre. Though flames licked the ceiling, nothing else in the room caught fire. And the smell! When people burned, they released a horrific stink. Fried liver combined with singed hair. The odor emanating from the lab was bizarre. Floral air freshener.
The doctor backed away from the window and pulled off his gloves. Hurled them down. “I’m done with this!” he hollered, and ran for the exit.
Rossi knew his fear wasn’t from the fire alone. Minutes earlier, he’d extracted petals from the woman’s nostrils, ear canals, mouth. From the corners of her eyes. Hideous pink tears. As he’d recited his findings into the mike, his voice had quivered with astonishment. While the investigator had remained silent, Rossi could see his tension through his mask. With each petal, his eyes grew larger.
Despite the racket around them – the alarm, a voice over the intercom urging calm, supervisors shouting orders, people evacuating - Rossi and the investigator stayed posted at the door, attention glued to the spectacle inside the lab. No smoke clouded their view through the window. There was only the sprinkle of the water and the dancing flames atop the table. They could have been watching a fireplace scene on a television screen, except that the log was in the shape of a person.
In less than five minutes time, the human fuel was all but consumed and the flames died. When firefighters arrived to douse the blaze, all they found was a black skeleton atop a gleaming stainless steel table, wisps of smoke rising from the bones.
One of the firefighters reached with a gloved finger.
With the man’s touch, the charred figure collapsed flat like a stack of incinerated newspapers. The ashes mixed with the water standing atop the rimmed slab, and the fluid overflowed. The remains of Sister Rose dripped and pooled onto the floor. Dirty puddles after a downpour.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” said the investigator, pulling out his handset and heading for the stairs.
Turning away from the window, Rossi fingered her cell. No signal. She’d try it outside. As she closed her phone, her eyes caught a small plaque posted to the right of the door. The words were in Latin:
Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae.
Rossi had witnessed numerous postmortems, and recognized that sign from other morgues. This was the first time she doubted its message:
This is the place where death rejoices to help the living.
Death wasn’t lending anyone a hand here.
As she ran up the stairs, the team of firefighters came up behind her. Rossi and the crew spilled out into the main floor of the hospital. The hall was empty, but through the glass doors they could see the detritus of an evacuated hospital. Doctors in scrubs and nurses in smocks. Patients wrapped in blankets, some standing and others in wheelchairs and on gurneys. Intravenous poles strung with bags of fluid.
“Hey,” said one of the firemen, jogging up next to her. “You know what happened?”
“Haven’t a clue.”
That was a lie. She had a theory, but couldn’t share it with anyone but her partners.
Rossi pushed through the front doors, waded through the throng and didn’t stop until she was standing on the boulevard across the street. Sirens continued to wail in the distance. Police and sheriffs’ squads were coming down the street, followed by a television news van. She wondered what hospital administration would tell the public. If they were smart, they’d say the entire room caught fire and took the corpse with it. Bad P.R. to have bodies catching fire for no apparent reason. What would they tell the poor woman’s brother? Accidental cremation? To keep her team’s work under the radar, she’d have to keep pleading ignorance on the whole thing. Hopefully, local authorities would continue to see her as a neutral observer who happened to be in the autopsy room for the freakish event.
Milling around outside with other emergency room refugees, MacLeod spotted Rossi standing away from the chaos. He started to elbow his way through the crowd when he caught a nugget of intriguing conversation between an older nurse and a big doctor in scrubs.
Doctor: “...couldn’t have anything to do with what took place this morning.”
Nurse: “Two weird things happening the same day in a hospital this size. What are the chances?”
Weird things were the Scot’s specialty. The two gossipers were to his right, so he looked to his left to feign disinterest.
“A scam and a fire. How could they be related?” asked the doctor. “Doesn’t make sense.”
“All I’m saying is...”
Their voices dropped, and MacLeod couldn’t decipher their whispers. He closed his eyes and concentrated on blocking out the bedlam around him. Sirens. A car door slamming. Patients in front of him complaining about the long wait in the ER. The woman to his left rattling her own IV stand. Inhaling deeply and exhaling slowly, MacLeod relaxed and willed away the commotion. The static.
After a silent interlude, he heard the internal conversations, the words scrolling through the minds of those standing outside. He’d learned over the years that while people’s mouths said one thing, their minds were running on about something else.
I’m the one who should have got the bump in pay, not you. Why is it that the shit rises to the top instead of the cream? I’m gonna pull my resume together and...What if it’s cancer? Who will take care of the kids? Please don’t let it be cancer. Please, God. Don’t let it be...Pudding. Pudding. Pudding. Did I circle the pudding for tonight’s dessert? Pudding. Pudding...I gotta pee. When are they gonna let us back in?
Like a man fiddling with a radio dial and searching for the right station, he worked to tune his inner ear to the pair on his right.
There. Got it.
...dumb bitch is starting to swallow that miracle crap...
...wouldn’t try to scam us like that. I’ve known Jimbo forever. The whole Schultz clan. That asshole’s theory that Jim has a twin is the most idiotic thing I’ve ever...
...can’t grow a new leg, for Christ’s sake. If she believes that...
The IV woman rolled her stand over MacLeod’s foot and he started. “Damn.”
“Sorry,” stumbled the woman. “I’m sorry.”
The doctor and nurse parted ways, the former joining a cluster of other men in scrubs and the latter taking charge of an elderly woman in a wheel chair. MacLeod would never be able to reconnect with either one of them. That he’d managed to make the initial contact was surprising, especially with the pandemonium around him. His psychic abilities were forever a work in progress. Sometimes he could concentrate and utilize them at will, such as in this crazy setting or the Sistine Chapel. Other times they came on without effort or warning, such as when he was overpowered by the rose smells – an olfactory portent of what he and his merry band were going to come across.
Having collected a name and an incident – Jimbo and something involving a new leg - MacLeod resumed his trek across the street, joining Rossi on her grassy island. She was fiddling with her cell and cursing. It started to ring, and she snapped it shut.
“Pleased to see that you didn’t fry, Sam I Am.”
“Someone else did, though.” She told him what had happened during the autopsy.
“Bletheration!”
“Here’s my theory: The old nun saw something at that convent related to this miracle stuff and took off to report it. To get help. Someone followed her and killed her, and planted something in her body that would ignite – to get rid of evidence.”
“Tidy theory, except for the flower petals.”
“I’m still working on explaining those.”
“Another sort of miracle? A wicked one?”
“Is there such a thing?” She opened her cell.
“Sir Ry Guy. We’ve got to warn him.”
&nb
sp; “I’ve been trying to do that since I got outside, but I’m having trouble.” She punched in some numbers and her phone started to ring. She closed it. “Dammit! I dial Ryan and my own phone rings. When I answer it...”
“What?”
“Never mind. Nothing.”
“We’d better drive over there,” said MacLeod.
“Did you get to see a doc before all hell broke loose?”
“I did.” That was a lie; he didn’t want to go back inside and hang around the ER waiting room for another hour.
“What did he say?”
“Fit as a fiddle,” he said, patting his stomach.
As the pair ran to the car, MacLeod took out his cell and tried the priest. As soon as he pressed the last digit, his phone rang. He put it to his ear and frowned. Held it away from him. It was loud enough for Rossi to hear. “God sakes! What is that annoying song?”
It was a children’s tune, sung by a chorus of high-pitched voices.
“Same as mine,” Rossi said. “An old nursery rhyme.”
“Enough!” MacLeod snapped his phone closed.
They got into the Suburban with Rossi behind the wheel. She rammed the key into the ignition and turned on the engine.
The radio blared with the nursery rhyme.
Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies!
Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down!”
MacLeod reached for the dials, but nothing he turned or punched had any effect. “Bloody awful!” he bellowed over the childish voices.
Rossi turned off the engine, and yanked the key out of the ignition.
Still the voices continued.
“Shut your mouth!” MacLeod shouted at the radio, and banged his fist over the controls.
Rossi remembered Khoury’s road music was in the car. She rammed the key in the ignition and turned. Pressed the power button on the CD player.
The childish singing halted, replaced by a Gregorian chant.
MacLeod fell back in his seat with relief. “Saints preserve us.”
Rossi turned up the reverent male voices. “They sure as hell did.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Unplug it!” yelled the abbess, covering her ears as she ran into the bedroom.
The Devil's Own Crayons Page 19